Protestors from the environmental group Greenpeace staged an hour long demonstration atop Apple’s European headquarters in Cork, Ireland on Wednesday. They were protesting the use of coal-powered electricity to power the iCloud service.
AppleInsiderThe demonstrators scaled the top of the Apple building in Cork about 7 a.m. local time and voluntarily came down after about an hour, according to the Irish Examiner. Local police and firefighters arrived on the scene after the protest began, and Greenpeace members passed out pamphlets to Apple employees at the company’s European headquarters.
While the protestors placed signs on the building with letters spelling out “clean our cloud”, Greenpeace also took the time to praise Apple’s energy policy in Ireland, where the device maker’s Cork headquarters relies on renewable energy sources.
AppleInsider reports, “Similar demonstrations were also said to have been staged at Apple-run facilities in Turkey and Luxembourg. The protests were coordinated to bring attention to a study released by Greenpeace on Tuesday entitled “How Clean is Your Cloud?,” which panned Apple’s iCloud service and massive data center in Maiden, N.C., for relying largely on coal-based power.”
Apple has been quick to rebut Greenpeace’s claims, saying that renewable energy will provide 50 percent more of the power needs of its North Carolina data center than Greenpeace projected.
“Our data center in North Carolina will draw about 20 megawatts at full capacity, and we are on track to supply more than 60 percent of that power on-site from renewable sources including a solar farm and fuel cell installation which will each be the largest of their kind in the country,” spokeswoman Kristin Huguet said. “We believe this industry leading project will make Maiden the greenest data center ever built, and it will be joined next year by our new facility in Oregon running on 100 percent renewable energy.”
